Emerence and her neighbor have a bit of a to-do over her cat killing his pigeons. She refuses to keep the cat confined to the house. So the neighbor

tracked the noble hunter down, grabbed hold of him and strung him up from the handle of Emerence’s front door. Returning home, the old woman had to stand there, under her own porch roof, while he gave her a formal lecture: he had been forced, regrettably, to defend his family’s only guaranteed livelihood, with the instruments of his choice.

Emerence said not a word. She released the cat from the wire, the ‘instrument’ the executioner had chosen over ordinary rope. The corpse was a shocking sight, its throat gaping wide.

What a creepy, horrifying scene! And in a novel whose voice is so quiet!

This morning, self tore through My Cousin Rachel. Of course she knew how it was going to end, but when the end came it was still — a shock. And du Maurier, true to form, leaves the mystery of Rachel and how she ended up where she did unanswered in any definitive way. So it ends on a cliff-y. As did Rebecca. AARRRGH!

Self moved on to Magda Szabo’s The Door.

Amazing: The Door reads like it could have been written by du Maurier. The unreliable narrator, the fanciful dreams (or nightmares), the mysterious Other Person. Self sincerely hopes every novel she reads from here on out — My Antonia, by Willa Cather; Emma, by The Immortal Jane; and a short list of women science fiction writers that includes N. K. Jemisin, Fonda Lee, Analee Neuwitz, and Martha Wells — sound like du Maurier. Because she would just have a rip-roaring time!

Last fall, she read mostly nonfiction. There was a book about the last months of Franklin Roosevelt, and an oral history about Chernobyl, and an essay collection by a British surgeon named Thomas Marsh. She also read Ian McEwan’s short novel Saturday, and even though it left her cold, she can remember it in every particular.

Self is bemused by the reviews of The Door on goodreads. She can’t believe everyone’s getting so attached to a novel about a woman’s relationship with her housekeeper. From the chapter called “The Contract”:

So here I stood in the garden, face to face with this silent old woman, since it had become clear that if someone didn’t take over the housekeeping there would be little chance of my publishing the work I’d produced in my years of silence, or finding a voice for anything new I might have to say.